Just a few quick links today. Please note there will be no linkblogging tomorrow. The last issue of Batman RIP is out tomorrow in the US, but not til Thursday in the UK. While I don’t normally avoid spoilers – if something can be spoiled by knowing the ending, it’s usually not worth it – this is a bit different, as it’s a story that’s kept me on the edge of my seat for more than two years now, and I want to see how Morrison ties it up without hearing the ending somewhere else first. So I shall be avoiding most of my usual net haunts tomorrow, and unable to find anything to link to, until I can get my copy.

Anyway…

Gavin Burrows, who you may recognise from his comments here, has a good post up on Dylan’s John Wesley Harding.

Alex Wilcock has a post up about Labour’s disgraceful, criminal treatment of mental health services, as well as their attitude toward the poor. Wilcock doesn’t really go far enough – anyone who thinks that Labour have any concern at all for the disadvantaged, remember that Labour have cut, on average, two mental health beds per day since they came into power. I could rant for hours – days – about the disgraceful state of the mental health system in this country, about how it demoralises staff until they quit like I did, or until they become ill themselves, about how it fails patients, who get kicked out as soon as they’re semi-coherent in order to free up the bed, only to return a few weeks later, and about how it puts patients, staff (such as my wife) and the general public in danger to save a few pennies… Wilcock’s points about the current benefits system are entirely correct too…

And Tim O’Neill at the Hurting is doing a great series of posts on comics culture in the early 90s and the Death Of Superman storyline. I only have a URL for one of them in my buffer, but you should be able to get to the rest from there.